For over a decade, now, our growth has been over 6 percent, a feat unimaginable a few decades earlier and an outcome that also reflects the government's commitment and choices. Contrary to some popular narratives, the government's policies significantly shaped the quality of growth in Bangladesh. For example, the governments consistently supported cash transfer programs, encouraged the participation of Civil Society Organizations (CSOs), and designed pro-poor fiscal and monetary policies that touched the lives of those who needed the most. Happily, for us, Henry Kissinger’s ‘Bottom-less Basket’ prediction has been proven wrong, as has Kuznets’ theory of rising inequality at the early stages of growth. Although our policies might not have been always holistic or well-coordinated, they were always sincere and mostly consistent-these policies deserve a substantial part of the credit. We all know Bangladesh is now at a crossroads of development. We are witnessing one of the largest manufacturing-led take-offs in a democracy. The economy is ready to reap the benefits of its comparative advantages, including our demographic dividend. For that, we need to transform our huge population into human capital. We need to upgrade the productivity of both skilled and unskilled workers as well as the capacity of both private and public-sector institutions. A competent bureaucracy is, therefore, a must for any sustained economic take-off. This is especially more so in a private sector-led growth process in a democracy. Needless to say, this constraint is also more binding during the middle-income transitions. The path to achieving a developed Bangladesh by 2041 requires a capable bureaucracy, as evidenced by the experiences of East Asia and advanced economies. We are heartened by the government's urgency in enhancing the skills of the people to maximize the population dividend and its benefit. Along with the general skills development program, the government has also prioritized the training of new cohorts of visionary bureaucrats with

knowledge and skills who can better design, implement, and evaluate the next generation of reforms in Bangladesh. The quality of our bureaucracy will critically influence the growth trajectory in the next phase of our development. A mature private sector has rightly contributed to the developmental effort ever more than before. But during the middle-income transitions, being right may not be enough. An enabling environment for the bureaucracy is a necessary condition for sustained take-off. An efficient bureaucracy with practical knowledge combined with an open, constructively critical approach that can address the questions of governance and policy development is the need of the hour. Moreover, effective implementation relies on evidence-based policy formulation and evaluation, which is essentially an iterative process. Therefore, a dynamic, innovative, and thoughtful bureaucracy is a sine-qua-non for moving to the next higher plane. It is the earnest hope of BIGM that the policy analysis training would provide a set of conceptual frameworks for analysing public policy and formulating effective strategies for policy design, analysis, evaluation, and advocacy. The concepts, skills, and analytical tools participants would learn in the training would rest upon a foundation of economic principles, institutional analysis, and political and social psychology. They would be able to identify, analyse, predict the patterns of behaviour and outcomes, and ultimately enhance policy effectiveness. That in turn would infuse dynamism, innovation, and critical reasoning into the bureaucracy responsive to the complex world we now live in. 2600 years ago, the Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu, said, ‘The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step’. We are taking that first step in an unprecedented journey for the 160 million Bangladeshis. We are embarking on that journey by carrying the inspirations and the sacrifices of the past. And with that resolve, pragmatism, and optimism, our top policymakers will train a new brand of trained human-ware for a more just, more inclusive, and more developed Bangladesh.